A Good Start

Are we in gift-shopping season? Not exactly.

On the flip side, gift-shopping season also overlaps with cookie baking season, and Christmas party season, and Thanksgiving prep season, and miserable travel season, and several other seasons.

By which we mean, maybe getting something off your plate early wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And this foldable drone? It’s the exact kind of gift we specialize in here at Meh. I.e., the secondary gift that punches above its price tag.

If someone’s specifically asking for a drone as their primary gift, you might want to get something else. You know, like the specific model they want. But if you’ve got someone who’s drone-curious on your nice list, or even someone who just loves gadgets, this would make the perfect Christmas morning surprise, even if they won’t even take it out of the box until a few weeks later.

With this in mind, maybe a better designation than ‘secondary gifts’ might be ‘January gifts.’ You know, the stuff that initially gets set aside in favor of a big gift–a new game console, or a tablet, maybe–only to be enjoyed come the New Year.

And yes, they will enjoy it. That’s according to Amazon, where this thing has racked up more than 5,000 reviews, most of them of the 5- and 4-star varieties.

Many reviewers note it’s a good beginner model. Like Carolyn Slusser:

This drone has begun to change my life literally. I’m 41. Since a child my father has taken me to air shows, and we shared an interest in flying objects. I’ve tried 3 remote control airplanes, one remote control helicopter, and multiple sub-$50 drones. Never got any of them to fly. After about 7 years I decided to try again with a little better of a drone. I purchased this one. And it wasn’t a mistake. I’ve had it for a week and every day have been out flying. I crashed a few times learning forward and backwards when drone head is opposite (Coming back to me) but still haven’t had to replace propellers and no major damage.

And Carolyn’s not the only one to test its durability. Stephanie B. says:

It’s very fun and is basically a brick… in a good way; I have crashed it into a basketball hoop 4 times and it still flies.

Todd Miller’s, meanwhile, spent two months in a tree:

had a great few weeks with it playing and learning. then i had an incident. i took it up to our property to see if i could get an aerial view of the land. it did great going out and flew against the wind. as the remote battery failed the drone veered off course and crashed into a tall pine tree. i couldn’t climb up and couldn’t even tell which tree it was in.

i had written this off as i couldn’t climb the tree and couldn’t recover the drone. fast forward 2 months. it’s a really windy day. i go to the base of the trees and actually see the drone sitting upside down on the ground. i couldn’t believe it.

i removed the battery. cleaned the corrosion off the contacts and took it inside. i changed remote batteries, charged up the spare battery and took the drone outside.

it still works!!!

If there are two complaints we saw frequently, they were:

1. You don’t want to fly this in any wind. Like, even just a breeze is tough.

And…

2. It’s not quite a drone, but also not quite a toy.

That, at least, was the conclusion from Nordix:

This drone is a notch above a toy model - and while not a toy per se, it is not a drone that you could do much with other than have fun with. It may be a good starting drone to learn controls and get the hang of flight before investing in a more expensive drone. This may be a good drone for a roofer to look at a high-pitch roof, or a real estate agent to take aerials of a house, but I suspect its use in a professional setting is limited.

But this doesn’t seem too bad to us, especially if you’re giving it as a gift, and especially at our price. If it’s not something the recipient is expecting, you want it to be easy enough to get started, but not so simple. After all, it would be a pretty lame gift if all it did was spark someone’s interest, thus resulting in an immediate several-hundred-dollar purchase of a better model.

See, like we said: a great gift. And if you get it now, you can focus on the fun stuff come November. Like navigating political conversations at Thanksgiving following a very contentious midterm election season.

Okay, maybe ‘fun’ might be the wrong word here…